Hiatus number 2

Category: Editorial

Four Years and a Hiatus

Four Years and A Hiatus

This is the last non-patron post you’ll see on the site for a while, because as I indicated in our last editorial – I’m burnt the hell out on the site and I need to take some extended time to reconnect with the hobby rather than the hustle.    But today…

A plushie of the 'This is Fine' dog

The Obligation

You’re reading this on Monday. On Friday Mrs Meeple and I will be on a plane, heading off to our new home in Gothenburg. It’s an exciting time to be sure – I’m looking forward to starting my new role at Chalmers University of Technology. I’ve been working towards this,…

The Disrespectfulness of reporting play counts

Misleading with Play Counts

One of the topics that often bubbles up in the rotating ‘issue of the day’ conveyor belt of online discussion is that of reviewers and play counts – specifically, the question of whether reviewers should include these as part of their review content so as to let people decide how…

The fun of inaccessibility

The Fun of Inaccessibility

There’s an awkward secret at the heart of the quest for game accessibility.  Well, I guess it’s not a secret so much as an uncomfortable truth that we don’t talk about a lot.   It’s pretty much unique to this field of accessibility work – there are no real parallels in…

Unwon and Unwinnable Causes

Unwon and Unwinnable Causes

‘You talk of Scotland as a lost cause’, John Steinbeck once remarked to Jackie Kennedy.  ‘That is not true.  Scotland is an unwon cause’.  As a supporter of Scottish independence, I take those words to heart.   Here we are, shackled to a political state that is alarmingly self-destructive in its…

Stay in your Lane

Stay In Your Lane

I think I’ve been consistently upfront with what I consider to be the biggest weakness of this site.  It’s included as a disclaimer at the bottom of every teardown, and it’s persistently the thing that makes me feel most uneasy about Meeple Like Us on a day to day basis. …

House rules and accessibility

The Accessibility of House Rules

Continuining our occasional series of posts about the AXSchat we conducted a few months ago I want to address another of the uniformly great questions asked during the Twitter chat that followed the interview.

Question five:  Being able to select a difficulty level is a well-known accessibility benefit of digital games. …

Mindful Jargon

Mindful Jargon

How might you describe your favourite board game?   Mine is Chinatown, and if I was trying to explain what it was I might say something like:

‘Chinatown, right… it’s like… well, imagine… no, wait.  Hang on.  It’s like… a pure negotiation game with economic set collection and tile-based area control, except…

Social Advocacy

Social Advocacy

Let’s talk about a hypothetical game. A video game.  A video game that doesn’t exist.  Let’s say it’s called… Fled Bread Dimension. Fled Bread Dimension Two.

It’s not a real game.

And let’s say as part of the making of this hypothetical game, the hypothetical company behind its creation was revealed to…